Soldiers in war, hunters, builders of bridges and tunnels. The courage of women is much more subtle. Builders of the home, protectors of the man’s image of himself. Feed the family without destroying his pride. Be resourceful without undermining his own faith in himself. Be the beating heart that fuels his hope.
I told Paolo the next morning that I was growing bored without the store. Claudio had mentioned how hungry the men were who came to the Palace—how he could keep them longer, attract more to the bar if he could offer a meal now and then. Sonny behind the bar knew how to pour a drink, but couldn’t even light the stove. It would give me something to do during the day, if I cooked for the Palace customers. Claudio was willing to let me try. We’d see if these Americans would eat my sausage and peppers.
I slipped into the kitchen as the watchmakers began their strike. It kept my mind off the fury surrounding the clockworks, the picket lines, the shouting, the cops. Paolo came home at night exhausted from shuttling back and forth between the owners and the workers, between the local and the national union. One time, he arrived with a bloody head, a bruised arm.
He was too tired, too preoccupied, to notice the money fil ing the jewelry box in my top drawer. He was simply grateful for the warm meal I put in front of him and the warm body I welcomed him with every night.
CHAPTER 33
Carmine
When the pains started one afternoon I dismissed them, ignored them, went on with preparing the evening meal for the Palace. But the pains didn’t stop, didn’t fade away as they had in the past. I managed to serve dinner to the men who’d come to depend on my cooking, who had helped my business flourish in only a few short months. But when Paolo arrived to play the piano, I told him it was time to fetch Flora and Til y. He had rushed, white-faced, to bring them to me.
I had tried to appear calm when I’d told Paolo, but I was so frightened. I wasn’t ready. It was too soon. This baby was not due for two more months.
I should have remembered. Somewhere in me should have been Giuseppina’s wisdom, her healing, her hands on my bel y.
But nothing. I searched frantical y, cal ing her name, wandering through the past as if through the rooms of her house. Where was she?
Oh—another one.. .too long…no rest.
I was cold, my body was shaking, the sweat ran down my cheeks, my neck. I heard the voices of Til y and Flora.
“She’s so tiny How will she ever manage?” someone whispered, thinking I couldn’t hear.
If Giuseppina had been there, she would have shown me, guided me. Why couldn’t I remember? Why hadn’t I paid attention?
How long had this been going on? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t take another minute, another pain. The light
—I saw the light through the window—was it morning already? Why didn’t it stop? Why didn’t the baby come?
“The head, here’s the head.” A voice, agitated. A flurry of activity around me.
“Just a few more minutes, Giulia. It’s time to push.” Til y bent close to my ear.
I couldn’t bear this pain for a few more minutes. It was tearing me apart. Giuseppina!
A darkness, a silence. It was over.
I turned my head to Til y; my hands reached out, beseeching, for the life that had just struggled and ripped its way through me.
But Til y came toward me empty-handed, empty-eyed.
I released a wail that came from no place I had known before, not even in those lost moments of pain from the last hours. In that agony had at least been hope, life.
There was no other sound except mine—blood-soaked, emptying, the howling of a she-wolf in the mountains above our vil age.
Someone tried to hold me, to comfort me with chamomile tea and a cool cloth pressed to my forehead—as if the pain were in my bel y or my head, as if there were some simple remedy to restore me.
But I was broken, shattered as though I’d been hurled from a bridge onto stones below. My body lay curled in on itself, hol ow.
In the corner I saw Til y fumbling with a match and a red glass. She lit the votive candle and set it down on the dresser. I heard her droning prayers to saints I no longer remembered, to a God who had, in this moment, turned away from me.
I turned away, as wel , from Til y’s piety. In the other corner I saw Flora at the table with a basin. She was washing the baby’s body with great tenderness.
I did not even know if it was a girl or a boy. I begged Flora for the child. She faced me. Without hesitation, with understanding, she carried the swaddled corpse over to me.
I raised myself up, felt the blood leaving my body, leaned back against the pil ows. I took the silent, stil -warm body into my arms and unwrapped it.
A son. Paolo’s son. “Carmine,” I said.
His skin was a purple-blue. His eyelids were nearly transparent.
His hair was the color of a sunset. He had al his parts— nothing missing, nothing damaged. The only thing missing was breath.
It was my turn to bathe him now. My tears came, huge drops that fel from my eyes to his fragile chest. I felt as if I would lose my own breath, my grief came so fast, so relentlessly. I clutched at Carmine, unable to accept that in these last seven months I had been unable to give him life.
He had kicked me two nights before. So resounding, so ful of himself that Paolo had felt it, too, lying next to me. Paolo had cradled my bel y in his hands, then, pressing his ear to it, listened for his child. I had always felt cherished by Paolo, but this pregnancy had turned me into an object of such adora tion and desire it had been almost impossible to fathom the depth of his feeling for me. Whenever my mother was pregnant, I remember my father’s eye wandering farther and farther away the bigger her bel y grew. But Paolo had been drawn closer and closer with each passing month. He found me so beautiful.
Paolo…Paolo.Where was he? Had someone told him? Or had they al been so preoccupied here with me, with death?
Flora came and gently took the baby away from my grasp.
“I’m going to dress him now, Giulia, before he—” She stopped, not wanting to say what would happen, what would take him farther away from the living child I thought I’d be holding now. He would grow cold. He would stiffen. He would rot.
I released him to her. The clothes I’d made for him lay wrapped in tissue paper in the top drawer of the dresser. A jacket, a gown, booties, a hat. Crocheted with a 00 hook and the finest gauge cotton. My aunts had written with suggestions for more useful things, without ornamentation, that would stand up well to repeated washings. Practical quilted kimonos and plain muslin gowns. I had made those, too, dutiful y.
The stitches on the baby’s jacket were tight and smooth. When I brushed it along the side of my cheek, it glided like silk. There were no mistakes, no dropped stitches or uneven edges. If I had discovered a problem as I was working, I ripped out what I’d done and redid it. It was perfect.
But it was too big. He would never grow into it.
There was a smal cross and a medal to pin to his shirt, in the wooden box next to Til y’s candle. “Say a prayer when you put them on him,” I told Til y. “I can’t.”
Til y did not know my emptiness. She fussed, she prayed, she changed the sheets.
Paolo wasn’t there in those early morning hours to hear my screams and then the baby’s silence. Flora had sent him away during the night to sleep at her apartment when she’d realized how much farther I’d had to go in my labor. He returned home around eight in the morning to a desolate quiet. Til y had already gone; Flora had put on a pot of coffee and was sitting it the kitchen table. I could see her through the door as Paolo walked in. No words passed between them. A question in Paolo’s eyes was answered by the mute shaking of Flora’s head. Then a sound emerged from Paolo’s throat, a sound of such despair and abandonment that I wanted only to rise from my own pain to comfort him.
“Giulia! Giulia! How could God have taken her from me!”
He’d mistakenly thought from Flora’s gesture that h
e had lost me.
Flora quickly got up from the table and put her arm around her brother, directing him toward the bedroom.
“No! No! Giulia’s here, Paolo. Weak, but alive. It’s your son we’ve lost.”
Paolo stumbled into the bedroom and knelt at the side of the bed, resting his head on my empty bel y. He put his arms around me and I found the strength to return his embrace, feeling his relief and gratitude that I had survived? For al the comfort and solicitous care I’d received from Flora and Til y in the last few hours, they hadn’t shared my grief the way Paolo now did. We mourned our dead son together, holding one mother until our tears subsided.
CHAPTER 34
Milk
Carmel a Colavita across the al ey had no milk. Flora told me this the morning after Carmine’s birth and death, when she came over to help me do the wash. She was elbow-deep in soapy water scrubbing the bloody sheets Til y had set to soak in bleach the day before.
I waited. Was this neighborly concern or an attempt to demonstrate to me that others, within sight of my own windows, had their problems, too? But Flora did not seem to be concerned about my sinking into misery. She looked at me directly, matter-of-factly.
“So will you help?”
I looked down at my breasts, heavy and aching. I had put hot compresses on them the night before to ease the tenderness. How many days before the milk dried up, unused, unheeded, and my body forgot the last seven months?
I remembered the women in Venticano who appeared like angels at the bedside of a mother who had died giving birth, offering nourishment to a wailing, hungry child. Or who came to the aid of women like my mother, bedridden for months carrying twins, unable to feed both adequately. Who were these women, with their generous breasts, their open arms? My brother Frankie, the twin who survived, could always find refuge in the skirts of Lucia Russo. As a boy of five he’d been chased by some bul ies and our older brothers had been nowhere to be found. He’d raced frantical y to Lucia’s cottage and she’d protected him, chasing the other boys away with her cast-iron pan as she’d cursed them for daring to threaten Frankie.
As a little girl, I hadn’t given a second thought to the women like Lucia. She used to come with Frankie and sit by Giuseppina’s fire in the winter. She’d felt more welcome there than in my mother’s house.
Giuseppina had her remedies, her teas and herbs, for the women whose milk was scarce or thin, but in end, Lucia was her al y, her final choice, in the battle to keep her grandson alive and growing.
I had no need of Giuseppina’s medicines. My blouse was already wet, two round circles of dampness spreading across the front. I folded my arms across my chest to stem the surge of milk. What a waste, I thought.
“Of course I’ll help,” I told Flora, who nodded.
“She’ll be so relieved. She’s been frantic with worry.’ It’s not like the vil age at home,’ she told me, ‘where someone would be on your doorstep in an instant to feed an undernourished baby. ‘The poor girl has no one here. She came as a bride with her husband. Al her own family is stil back home.”
Carmel a brought me the baby that afternoon. Flora had already hung the sheets on the line out the kitchen window. The day was windless but bril iantly sunny and the sheets fel straight and stil as if this were August in my mother’s courtyard on Pasqualina’s wash day. The sheets betrayed no sign of the struggle. They were restored to their original whiteness.
Flora left a soup for Paolo’s dinner before going home to cook for her own family.
Carmel a’s little girl appeared sickly. She was very fretful, did not know what to do with a nipple. Moved her little face from side to side, screaming.
Carmel a could not keep her hands stil as she watched her daughter against my unfamiliar body. Her hands were rough, worn, not at al the hands of a woman younger than I was. She grasped the cloth of her skirt and bunched it in her fist, then released it, repeating the gesture as she muttered some words— prayers, a lul aby?
I tried to coax the baby to turn toward my breast but she did not stop screaming. She was so hungry.
When she opened her tiny mouth to scream, I slid in my finger. She stopped abruptly and sucked my finger.
With my finger stil in her mouth I eased her to my breast. She continued to suck. Her mother took a deep breath. My milk surged into my breasts, so painful y that I gasped. The baby’s blue-veined eyelids fluttered and then closed. Her agitated, frantic body slowed its kicking and grasping. Little noises of contentment filtered up.
I watched her face; I watched her mother’s face. The baby final y fel asleep at my breast, and the tiny fists that had been pummeling the air were splayed across my lap.
I sat staring at her for several more minutes while her mother’s tears fel quietly. I did not want to let go of her. I wanted to feel that weight leaning into me, to hear and measure that breathing, to smel that mixture of soap and milk.
But then I handed her back to her mother.
” Grazie, Signora Giulia,” she whispered.
“Bring her back later when she wakes up.”
When she left, I placed my hands on my breasts. They felt lighter. A gift, I thought. For me, for this baby, for this mother.
I turned and lit the stove under the soup and began to set the table for Paolo. I knew that he expected me to be stil resting, not up and about, and I wanted to surprise him.
I no longer felt tired.
CHAPTER 35
Bread and Roses
After Carmine died, I got pregnant again, and again carried the baby for seven months. It was such a tiny thing, tinier than Carmine. A little girl. Emilia, I named her. I can say her name now, in a soft voice, but the memories of those dead babies haunt me stil . My mother was right. There is no other pain, not even the pain of bearing those children, of giving birth to them, that is greater than the pain of losing them. Take my arm, my eye, cut me up piece by piece. That is what it’s like to have a child snatched from life.
The winter after I lost Emilia was bitterly cold. It drove us al inside, including the customers of the Palace. The bar was ful every evening and I kept warm over the stove in the kitchen, burying my grief by fil ing large pots with meatbal s and sausage.
Paolo’s grief was as raw as mine, but his pain was compounded by guilt and fear. Guilt that it was his passion, his desire for me that had caused us these losses; and fear that the next time he would lose me as wel as his child. A man does not know how to behave at these times. When he should have been able to walk down the street with his son riding on his shoulders and screaming with delight, “Babbo, Babbo, look at the sky,” he had only an empty cradle and an empty wife.
It is no wonder to me that he turned outside, taking refuge in his work with the union in the same way I had hidden in the Palace’s kitchen. I didn’t have the wil to hold him back or even question him, as his days and then his nights became consumed.
One night in January when he’d returned from New York City, I came up the stairs from the Palace to give him his dinner. I found him packing, throwing shirts, socks, his notebook and pen into an open bag on our bed.
I watched, my already pale face and slumping body losing whatever was left that had held me together over the last few months. I felt myself sink to my knees and leaned against the door frame for support.
“What’s this al about, Paolo? Where are you going?”
“Lawrence, in Massachusetts. Twenty thousand workers have walked out of the woolen mil s. Many of them are women and children, mostly Italians. In the last two days they’ve stopped production in thirty-four mil s.
New York got a telegram this morning. This isn’t something that the cops or the state militia are going to quash in a couple of days. The workers need help, a strike committee, organized relief. Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovanitti are going, and I’m going with them. I know the leaders—I worked with them when I was up there last year. They need me.”
He was almost feverish as he moved around the room grabbing clothe
s from a drawer, sweeping his books from the night table into a pile that he thrust into the bag. He was no longer the shel of a man who’d only been going through the motions of life in the last two months. He had reignited the fire within himself and it was smoldering in our bedroom. His face was flushed and his eyes glistened as he ticked off a mental list of what to take.
“When are you leaving?”
“Tonight. I’m meeting Joe and Arturo at the train station.”
He was a man of action that night, a man with a destination and a purpose. He was also a man who did not see me trying to cling to something solid and permanent as I was about to lose him to history yet again. I remembered Schenectady, and how little power I had to hold him back.
“Why now? Why the urgency? Why do they need you if the others are going?”
“Because this is momentous. Twenty thousand people, Giulia. It’s what we’ve been waiting for. They believe in us, they hear what we’ve been trying to tel them for years—that their power is in their col ective voice.”
I pul ed myself to my feet. My face felt as flushed as Paolo’s. I was jealous. Jealous of the passion he was feeling, not for me, but for a cause, for twenty thousand human beings struggling to put a loaf of bread on the table and clothes on the backs of their families. And I admired him, too, for the role he was about to play.
But watching him prepare to leave was kil ing me. My hands were shaking and I could feel the tears stinging my eyes. Other women, my sisters and mother included, had to endure the cal ousness and betrayal of husbands whose eyes and hands wandered, who thought nothing of keeping a mistress on the side. I knew I was the only woman Paolo loved. I had no doubts I about his faithfulness. Even when he was gone to the city overnight. Even though I knew there were women involved in the union movement—American women who saw marriage as a convention of constraint. Even when Pip or Zi’Yolanda would insert the knife of their own discontent tipped with the poison of rumor and conjecture.
Linda Cardillo - Dancing On Sunday Afternoons Page 17